The question of scale for an MMO applies to more than just the ability of the servers to host an increasing number of simultaneous players in a single virtual world. It's also about gameplay, and the MMO paradox: the more massive the world, the less important each player. I would argue that one of the factors in WoW's enduring success is that Blizzard knew when to add new servers not purely for performance reasons, but also to keep the number of players in any particular server at a particular sweet spot.
Too few players and there's no sense of a living, persistent world; too many players and that world is stifling and uninviting.
Actually, it will be interesting to see how things play out with Sony's MAG -- an action game that sits somewhere between classic multiplayer and MMO scale.
It appears from the video that it's running a fairly sophisticated series of algorithms to compare backgrounds and determine how difficult it would be to do a convincing mask-out of the foreground object, of which it appears to have a sort of heuristic expectation of shape from the user's sketch.
For instance, if your background is a grassy field, the user has requested a dog running, and you have a photo of a dog running over grass and a dog running over pavement, the grass one will allow a greater margin of error in the masking and thus it gets selected.
Overall, this looks like a fantastic step forward for computer vision, bringing the computer ever closer to the non-Cartesian way our brains see.
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there
Granted. But what good is a world-class education in research if one lacks aptitude in communication? The greatest insight is useless if its discoverer cannot appropriately convey it.
The Hero represents a valiant effort from HTC -- though unfortunately, the company appears to have bitten off more than its last-generation hardware can chew. If this build of Android were to be loaded atop the guts of a 3GS or Pre, the performance would likely be astounding, but fused with the two-year old architecture of previous devices, it's mostly disappointing.
As for whatever succeeds the Hero, that might actually be able to run HTC's UI layer well enough to really give Palm and Apple a run for their money.
Just as we say today "wow, they had 737i prototypes in 1958!" one day in the future we will marvel "wow, they had 4096p prototypes all the way back in 2002!"
One of the biggest factors to the glacial pace of desktop display resolution this decade may be web standards.
A sudden jump in DPI just doesn't isn't practical for the pixel-for-pixel nature of the web (however much the W3C may try to change that). Sure, newer browsers will scale entire layouts to higher resolutions, but the image quality and often layout integrity lose a lot in the process. So, display manufacturers have kept everything in the 72-96 dpi range so that everything looks more or less the same.
look at the work by most VM software manufacturers who are making it so the VM can move around on physical hardware. Now if your hardware fails - the VM and OS does not. It just moves off somewhere else and continues to operate with little/no drop in performance or uptime.
This is the point where our sci-fi future is already visible as a thin shape on the horizon. A VM that lives independently of hardware points toward future abstraction layers where everything is machine-independent, managed transparently by such vastly capable and efficient abstraction that computing begins to take on the sense of a natural resource in abundant, malleable supply, truly becoming the image of its gaseous namesake.
And if you're lucky, your credit card company will buy the claim that you couldn't pay your bill because the 14 instances of Flash Player, 5 Javascript animations, 71 animated gifs, and 1 Java mirror-lake effect kept crashing your browser.
While I'm no Randian market absolutist, this is one place where there is a healthy market right now. While I think you're right that Google is trying to get Apple to open the iPhone a little more, I think their strategy extends beyond trying to get the FCC to look sternly at Apple: As the iPhone represents an important market for their product, extending Google Voice it to Android and Blackberry first is part of their strategy to pressure Apple to ease up.
Google needs Apple to increase their mobile app install base, and ultimately Apple will need Google to keep up the iPhone's functional parity with the rest of the market.
A book, being a non-executable, isn't going to suddenly delete your data or leak personal information to a third party. As long as the kill switch is only used for actually dangerous applications, it should be fine, with one caveat:
It shouldn't be automatic. The user should be prompted with a severe warning, and then allowed to continue at their peril. Because there are always exceptions.
Actually, if Amazon had set up their system to do something similar, there wouldn't have been a firestorm. "Warning: The seller of this book has been discovered not to own the distribution rights to it. You may keep this copy, or click here to exchange it for a properly-licensed one." That's all they would have needed to do.
The fact that Beacon is being shut down, the $9.5mil settlement, or even this nebulous new "independent foundation" are all secondary to one thing:
This delivers the message, unequivocally, that you don't sell out your users' private actions. Sure, plenty of other businesses engage in this sort of thing all the time in much more subtle ways than broadcasting what you thought was a private transaction, but in its own way, this is a coup. It's not going to change anything, even Facebook, overnight, but it's a loud and clear warning to any business thinking of pushing its luck.
People who have been using MS Office since it came on a small stack of floppies are going to keep using what they know. Businesses with a large IT infrastructure invested in supporting Office are going to keep supporting what they know.
Meanwhile, people who jumped on the Google Docs bandwagon -- they're going to keep using what they know, too. A web-based office suite happened to be what works for them, and now they're invested in the Google way of editing and managing office documents, with no incentive to switch to Microsoft's system.
Microsoft is probably going to get as many takers on web-based Office as Google would have if they'd launched a desktop office suite.
Gradually, of course, as web technologies continue to grow, MS Office and the web-based Office will ultimately merge, the only difference being where they're hosted. But not for a decade, at least.
Unfortunately, it's going to take more than even a firm "commitment" to fix the Kindle. The whole Kindle firmware needs to be redesigned so it's actually not possible for things to be remotely deleted. I know that may sound radical, but honestly, nothing less is going to cut it.
If I sold you something that I later found out I wasn't supposed to, sneaked into your house to retrieve it, but ultimately offered to make it up to you, that's one thing. I made good, right?
Now what if I kept the copy of your house key that I made to sneak in? Would you feel better if I assured you I won't use the key in the future unless you invite me over?
This is a feature that could indeed be convenient, but will it sell a phone? There's a vast number of criteria on which to base a phone choice, and a nice-but-not-life-changing feature like this seems like an extremely tough sell by itself.
Here's what I think Sony should have done (and could still do): instead of building a phone with this feature, build a protocol with the feature. License it out to third parties, and watch as various ecosystems pick it up. Build, or license someone to build, something on Symbian, BREW, WinMo, or how about the obvious: an iPhone app?
A protocol would open the doors to a bona-fide advancement in Sony's gaming platform. A single phone is just an interesting sideshow.
Slashdot Mirror
So the next step is to put a big dome over the town, trapping everyone inside, and... Oh wait, that was Springfield.
The question of scale for an MMO applies to more than just the ability of the servers to host an increasing number of simultaneous players in a single virtual world. It's also about gameplay, and the MMO paradox: the more massive the world, the less important each player. I would argue that one of the factors in WoW's enduring success is that Blizzard knew when to add new servers not purely for performance reasons, but also to keep the number of players in any particular server at a particular sweet spot.
Too few players and there's no sense of a living, persistent world; too many players and that world is stifling and uninviting.
Actually, it will be interesting to see how things play out with Sony's MAG -- an action game that sits somewhere between classic multiplayer and MMO scale.
It appears from the video that it's running a fairly sophisticated series of algorithms to compare backgrounds and determine how difficult it would be to do a convincing mask-out of the foreground object, of which it appears to have a sort of heuristic expectation of shape from the user's sketch.
For instance, if your background is a grassy field, the user has requested a dog running, and you have a photo of a dog running over grass and a dog running over pavement, the grass one will allow a greater margin of error in the masking and thus it gets selected.
Overall, this looks like a fantastic step forward for computer vision, bringing the computer ever closer to the non-Cartesian way our brains see.
Typing up email replies with boxing gloves on.
Although you don't really need the tech to hit the delete key!
Flash is indeed running on Android already. Just not on the G1, unfortunately.
RT @MITadmissions @masmullin sorry rejected #fail
Granted. But what good is a world-class education in research if one lacks aptitude in communication? The greatest insight is useless if its discoverer cannot appropriately convey it.
Have you used the Hero? You might be disappointed:
As for whatever succeeds the Hero, that might actually be able to run HTC's UI layer well enough to really give Palm and Apple a run for their money.
Less space than the SDK. Lame.
A whole 31% stated they care about random statistics long as they are related to the personal habits of CowboyNeal!
Obviously the movie studios were afraid of having their content available to consumers in such high resolutions!
But for all I know, that may not be entirely a joke.
Just as we say today "wow, they had 737i prototypes in 1958!" one day in the future we will marvel "wow, they had 4096p prototypes all the way back in 2002!"
One of the biggest factors to the glacial pace of desktop display resolution this decade may be web standards.
A sudden jump in DPI just doesn't isn't practical for the pixel-for-pixel nature of the web (however much the W3C may try to change that). Sure, newer browsers will scale entire layouts to higher resolutions, but the image quality and often layout integrity lose a lot in the process. So, display manufacturers have kept everything in the 72-96 dpi range so that everything looks more or less the same.
This is the point where our sci-fi future is already visible as a thin shape on the horizon. A VM that lives independently of hardware points toward future abstraction layers where everything is machine-independent, managed transparently by such vastly capable and efficient abstraction that computing begins to take on the sense of a natural resource in abundant, malleable supply, truly becoming the image of its gaseous namesake.
Sure. But laboratory staffers aren't sexually-reproducing lifeforms!
And if you're lucky, your credit card company will buy the claim that you couldn't pay your bill because the 14 instances of Flash Player, 5 Javascript animations, 71 animated gifs, and 1 Java mirror-lake effect kept crashing your browser.
Actually, that's more what would happen with a Facebook banking app.
And why I will never, ever sign into any other site through "Facebook Connect."
Whenever a post like this shows up, I always have to check to see if someone actually modded it insightful as well.
You guys never disappoint.
This is precisely why Facebook killed MySpace.
MySpace advertising: "HEY LOOK AXE BODY SPRAY HOT CHICKS YEAHH"
Facebook advertising: "Oh hey, you said you like design. These advertisers thought you might like this design book."
Even if I never buy the body spray or the design book, the former ad makes me dislike the product while the latter leaves me curious.
While I'm no Randian market absolutist, this is one place where there is a healthy market right now. While I think you're right that Google is trying to get Apple to open the iPhone a little more, I think their strategy extends beyond trying to get the FCC to look sternly at Apple: As the iPhone represents an important market for their product, extending Google Voice it to Android and Blackberry first is part of their strategy to pressure Apple to ease up.
Google needs Apple to increase their mobile app install base, and ultimately Apple will need Google to keep up the iPhone's functional parity with the rest of the market.
Well, this is different. Kind of.
A book, being a non-executable, isn't going to suddenly delete your data or leak personal information to a third party. As long as the kill switch is only used for actually dangerous applications, it should be fine, with one caveat:
It shouldn't be automatic. The user should be prompted with a severe warning, and then allowed to continue at their peril. Because there are always exceptions.
Actually, if Amazon had set up their system to do something similar, there wouldn't have been a firestorm. "Warning: The seller of this book has been discovered not to own the distribution rights to it. You may keep this copy, or click here to exchange it for a properly-licensed one." That's all they would have needed to do.
The fact that Beacon is being shut down, the $9.5mil settlement, or even this nebulous new "independent foundation" are all secondary to one thing:
This delivers the message, unequivocally, that you don't sell out your users' private actions. Sure, plenty of other businesses engage in this sort of thing all the time in much more subtle ways than broadcasting what you thought was a private transaction, but in its own way, this is a coup. It's not going to change anything, even Facebook, overnight, but it's a loud and clear warning to any business thinking of pushing its luck.
People who have been using MS Office since it came on a small stack of floppies are going to keep using what they know. Businesses with a large IT infrastructure invested in supporting Office are going to keep supporting what they know.
Meanwhile, people who jumped on the Google Docs bandwagon -- they're going to keep using what they know, too. A web-based office suite happened to be what works for them, and now they're invested in the Google way of editing and managing office documents, with no incentive to switch to Microsoft's system.
Microsoft is probably going to get as many takers on web-based Office as Google would have if they'd launched a desktop office suite.
Gradually, of course, as web technologies continue to grow, MS Office and the web-based Office will ultimately merge, the only difference being where they're hosted. But not for a decade, at least.
Unfortunately, it's going to take more than even a firm "commitment" to fix the Kindle. The whole Kindle firmware needs to be redesigned so it's actually not possible for things to be remotely deleted. I know that may sound radical, but honestly, nothing less is going to cut it.
If I sold you something that I later found out I wasn't supposed to, sneaked into your house to retrieve it, but ultimately offered to make it up to you, that's one thing. I made good, right?
Now what if I kept the copy of your house key that I made to sneak in? Would you feel better if I assured you I won't use the key in the future unless you invite me over?
This is a feature that could indeed be convenient, but will it sell a phone? There's a vast number of criteria on which to base a phone choice, and a nice-but-not-life-changing feature like this seems like an extremely tough sell by itself.
Here's what I think Sony should have done (and could still do): instead of building a phone with this feature, build a protocol with the feature. License it out to third parties, and watch as various ecosystems pick it up. Build, or license someone to build, something on Symbian, BREW, WinMo, or how about the obvious: an iPhone app?
A protocol would open the doors to a bona-fide advancement in Sony's gaming platform. A single phone is just an interesting sideshow.